Toolbox

Re-commoning

Methods used

Discourse analysis

Interviews

Research focus & objectives

The research focus of this project is re-commoning water with the objective of (i) investigating to what extent can a resistance to austerity frameworks mobilise new sets of actors and ignite new paradigms for water governance, (ii) examining ways in which the rise of water remunicipalisation as a ‘resistance-to-privatisation’ trend has enabled a threshold for ‘outside the box’ and commonsoriented practices around water governance as forms of re-commoning water resources, and (iii) documenting and assess the opportunities, and the risks and challenges that such experiments in recommoning water are presented with.

Methods applied

Discourse analysis

Interviews

Case Study Analysis (Flyvbjerg, 2006)
Relational comparative urban studies (Ward, 2010)
In-depth semi-structured Interviews
Discourse Analysis
Archival material

Analytical tools & literature

Commons framework

Recommended resources

Caffentzis G and Federici S (2014) Commons against and beyond capitalism. Community Development Journal, 49(1), 92–105.
Clement, F., Harcourt, W., Joshi, D., & Sato, C. (2019). Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning (Editorial to the Special Feature). International Journal of the Commons, 13(1), 1–15.
Clark C (2019) Water justice struggles as a process of commoning. Community Development Journal 54(1), 80–99.
De Angelis M and Harvie D (2014) The commons. In: Parker M, Cheney G, Fournier V, et al. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organizations [pp. 280-294]. Abingdon: Routledge.
Dell’Angelo J, D’odorico P, Rulli MC, et al. (2017) The tragedy of the grabbed commons: Coercion and dispossession in the global land rush. World Development 92: 1–12.Escobar A (2020) Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fournier V (2013) Commoning: On the social organisation of the commons. Management 4: 433–453.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Kaika, M. (2015). The uncanny materialities of the everyday: domesticated nature as the invisible ‘other’. In S. In Graham and C. Mcfarlane (Eds.), Infrastructural lives: urban infrastructure in context, Routledge Earthscan (pp. 139-152). New York and Abington.
Kaika M and Karaliotas L (2016) The spatialization of democratic politics: Insights from Indignant Squares. European Urban and Regional Studies 23(4), 556–570.
Kaika, M., & Ruggiero, L. (2016). Land financialization as a ‘lived’process: The transformation of Milan’s Bicocca by Pirelli. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(1), 3-22.
Mandalaki, E., & Fotaki, M. (2020). The Bodies of the Commons: Towards a Relational Embodied Ethics of the Commons. Journal of Business Ethics, 166(4), 745-760 [link]
Mies, M. (2014). No commons without a community. Community Development Journal, 49(1), i106-i117 [link]
Mouffe, C. (2000). For an Agonistic Model of Democracy. In The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
Nieto-Romero, M., Valente, S., Figueiredo, E., & Parra, C. (2019). Historical commons as sites of transformation. A critical research agenda to study human and more-than-human communities. Geoforum, 107, 113-123.
Nightingale, A. J. (2019). Political Communities, Commons, Exclusion, Property and SocioNatural Becomings. International Journal of the Commons, 13(1), 16–35.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pinto, M., Recano, L., & Rossi, U. (2022). New institutions and the politics of the interstices. Experimenting with a face-to-face democracy in Naples. Urban Studies, 0(0) [link]
Russell, B. (2019). Beyond the local trap: New municipalism and the rise of the fearless cities. Antipode, 51(3), 989-1010. Deliverable 6.2 20
Sato, C., & Alarcón, J. M. S. (2019). Toward a postcapitalist feminist political ecology approach to the commons and commoning. International Journal of the Commons, 13(1).
Stavrides S (2010) Towards the City of Thresholds. Brooklyn, NY and Philadelphia, PA: Common Notions.
Stavrides S (2015) Common space as threshold space: Urban commoning in struggles to reappropriate public space. Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 16, 9–20.
Sultana, F. (2011). Suffering for water, suffering from water: emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict. Geoforum, 42(2), 163-172.
Swyngedouw, E. (2018). Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Political Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Velicu, I., & García-López, G. (2018). Thinking the commons through Ostrom and Butler: Boundedness and vulnerability. Theory, Culture & Society, 35(6), 55–73.
Villamayor-Tomas S. &García-Lopez G. A. (2021). Commons movements: Old and new trends in rural and urban contexts. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46, 25.1–25.33.
Villamayor-Tomas S., García-Lopez G & D’Alisa G. (2022). Social movements and commons: In theory and in practice. Ecological Economics, 194, 107328.

Reflections and recommendations by the researcher

I would recommend for this type of research on social movements, to spend more time in the field conducting fieldwork which in turn heavily enriches the research process, as well offers deeper and more nuanced understandings of one's results. This further contributes in terms of framing one's research in a manner that does justice to the context investigated and within a larger context.

Do not underestimate the amount of time translation requires when conducting research outside of your languages of use, and the limits this presents, thus the need to treat the data with more care and attention.

Publication(s)

We invite you to read the paper published as part of this doctoral research:

Geagea, D., Kaika, M. & Dell'Angelo, J. (2023). Recommoning water: Crossing thresholds under citizendriven remunicipalisation. Urban Studies, 0(0) [link]

Researcher

Dona Geagea

Dona is an experienced facilitator and stakeholder engagement specialist, with a decade of work experience in the water sector. Currently she is completing a PhD on social water movements and emerging water governance practices (recommoning water) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as an Early Stage Researcher with NEWAVE – Next Water Governance. Formerly as Global Lead for Water Innovation Labs at Waterlution, a Canadian NGO, she designed and executed social innovation labs, emphasizing water knowledge-sharing and empowering emerging leaders to address water challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration across several countries in the northern and southern hemispheres. Dona has also organized and moderated workshops at prestigious water forums including Budapest Water Summit, Singapore International Water Week, World Water Forums, the UN Water Conference 2023, and GIZ’s Partnership on Climate Transparency Retreat. Being Lebanese born and partly growing up in Canada, she has developed a cultural fluency that enables working with diversity, from grassroots initiatives to high level policy fora. She works with tools from the Art of Hosting, Processwork, Systems and Design Thinking, Social Innovation Labs and Theory U among others. She is dedicated towards working with feminist political ecology principles centred around care.